Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I went a little farther, then still a little farther – till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back.”

— Joseph Conrad

452. “I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe from trouble in this world.”

— Joseph Conrad

453. “It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on – which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don’t know. To some place where they expected to get something, I bet! For me it crawled toward Kurtz – exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow.”

— Joseph Conrad

454. “No, it’s impossible. It’s impossible to tell anyone what it feels like to be you. It’s impossible. We live the same way that we dream – alone.”

— Joseph Conrad

455. “I descended the poop.”

— Joseph Conrad

456. “You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my – ’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him – but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”

— Joseph Conrad

457. “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

— Joseph Conrad

458. “Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together?”

— Joseph Conrad

459. “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

— Joseph Conrad

460. “Both these white men looked on native life as a mere play of shadows. A play of shadows the dominant race could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and needs.”

— Joseph Conrad

461. “The cruel futility of things stood unveiled in the levity and sufferings of that incorrigible people; the cruel futility of lives and of deaths thrown away in the vain endeavor to attain an enduring solution of the problem.”

— Joseph Conrad

462. “He was a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.”

— Joseph Conrad

463. “No wonder there are bandits in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary macaques to rule us...”

— Joseph Conrad

464. “A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.”

— Joseph Conrad

465. “This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh.”

— Joseph Conrad

466. “I seemed at one bound to have been transported into some lightless region of subtle horrors, where pure, uncomplicated savagery was a posi-tive relief, being something that had a right to exist – obviously – in the sunshine.”

— Joseph Conrad

467. “The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I.”

— Joseph Conrad

468. “Long after he had vanished, Nostromo, lifting his eyes up to the sky, muttered, “I am not dead yet.”

— Joseph Conrad

469. “Give them all of my dear love and a kiss. Tell them I think of them by day, pray for them by night, and find my best comfort in their affection at all times.”

— Joseph Conrad

470. “This was the foreman – a boiler-maker by trade – a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist.”

— Joseph Conrad

471. “But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”

— Joseph Conrad

472. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage.”

— Joseph Conrad

473. “What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”

— Joseph Conrad

474. “There is no occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police. It’s like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an uninhabited and thirsty plain.”

— Joseph Conrad

475. “Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well, – the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature, or the stupid brutality of crowds.”

— Joseph Conrad

476. “Not the faintest sound of any kind could be heard. You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf – then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as well.”

— Joseph Conrad

477. “He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them – the ship; and so is their country – the sea.”

— Joseph Conrad

478. “It was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that I had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of Sulaco, with its high shadowy Sierra and its misty campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil.”

— Joseph Conrad

479. “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.”

— Joseph Conrad

480. “We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face:.”

— Joseph Conrad

481. “The human heart is a vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?”

— Joseph Conrad

482. “He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad

483. “Then the earth for you is only a standing place – and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say.”

— Joseph Conrad

484. “Youth’ is a feet of memory. It is a record of experience.”

— Joseph Conrad

485. “I didn’t know what he was playing up to – if he was playing up to anything at all – and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad

486. “Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia – and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk.”

— Joseph Conrad

487. “Youth that is fresh enough to believe in guilt, in innocence, and in itself, will always doubt whether it have not perchance deserved its fate.”

— Joseph Conrad

488. “My dear aunt’s endeavours to ‘nurse up my strength’ seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”

— Joseph Conrad

489. “But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him medicines to drink, he recovered.”

— Joseph Conrad

490. “Those who tow’rds Acheron do not descend.”

— Joseph Conrad

491. “For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.”

— Joseph Conrad

492. “There can be no life without faith and love – faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That.”

— Joseph Conrad

493. “But at the corner I stopped to take my last look at the crew of the Narcissus. They were swaying irresolute and noisy on the broad flagstones before the Mint. They were bound for the Black Horse, where men, in fur caps with brutal faces and in shirt sleeves, dispense out of varnished barrels the illusions of strength, mirth, happiness; the illusion of splendor and poetry of life, to the paid-off crews of southern-going ships.”

— Joseph Conrad

494. “A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes’ neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet ankles. The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.”

— Joseph Conrad

495. “I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind.”

— Joseph Conrad

496. “Stein lifted his hand. “And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?” He shook his head regretfully. “It seems to me that some would have been very fine – if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don’t know.”

— Joseph Conrad

497. “It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.”

— Joseph Conrad

498. “This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.”

— Joseph Conrad

499. “Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.”

— Joseph Conrad

500. “The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar.”

— Joseph Conrad